We are excited to announce a truly unique one day conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota – The Phoenix Rising Event! A day focused on strengthening our local community of entrepreneurs and innovators by addressing the fear, stigma, and shame of failure head on. Please mark your calendars and join us on Wednesday, May 20th, 2015.
I am frequently an advocate for the benefits of children playing video games. I realize that I am somewhat of an outlier but watching my children play I have seen them building real world skills like logical thinking and problem solving. Occasionally I will hear their pangs of frustration but I appreciate watching them strengthen their resolve as they work to overcome a task and complete an adventure. Admittedly there can be many challenges too but for the most part I see the positives outweighing the negatives. Until this weekend, I hadn’t really understood a negative impact of one particular type of game – the Kinect Sports games.
Over the last year I had the opportunity to discover a hidden innovation gem in my own back yard. A group of companies had banded together to help each other build more innovative organizations, or at least organizations that could drive innovation with a higher degree of success. Innovators International was formed in 2007 out of work commissioned by the Mayo Clinic. Today it is a member partnership of 50 of the world’s most innovative companies who are working together to build each member their own structure for driving sustained innovation.
Over the last few years I have frequently helped friends and colleagues in their search to find new work opportunities. Every time I start our conversation by asking how they are building their personal brand. I know that it sounds a bit ridiculous but in the age of an abundance of job candidates, how are they going to stand out? How are they building their exposure to their professional network to improve the odds that they are found?
When working with organizations I frequently talk about the need to build a “Propensity for Action” in order to support driving growth and innovation. With many for profit, and nonprofit, organizations it is far too easy to cower behind the “Tyranny of No” rather than building a culture of action around the tools of hypothesis, test, and verify. A frequently response from leaders is that new ideas are too costly or too risky to take on but if the alternative is waiting for the perfect answer it can be equally damaging to an organization. The challenge is that the odds are stacked against new ideas and most of them will not work out at planned – they will fail. The irony is that unless you are willing to take action and risk possible failure you will remain stuck with the status quo.
Earlier this week I was presenting in front of a group of successful entrepreneurs, each of whom had built a business from scratch and turned it into a $10m+ company. As they talked about their businesses you could see the passion for their company oozing out of their pores. They had “made it” by almost every definition of the word but you could tell that their entrepreneurial spirit hadn’t waned. Their success had afforded them more control over their time but they certainly weren’t resting on their laurels. They were passionate about growing their businesses. This post is my first in a series on Leadership in Small Companies vs. Big Companies and covers how small companies can be more focused on hiring for passion.
It seems like everyone is jumping on the Ron Johnson “failure” bandwagon the last few days. Being that he was a fellow hometown kid from Minnesota and having earned his retail chops at Target Corp I had followed Johnson’s tenure at JCPenney pretty closely over the last 17 months. When Johnson and his team launched their “Transformational Plans” for JCP back in January, 2012 I had watched the entire 93 minute presentation. I thought the presentation was articulate and very well thought through. Interestingly enough just last month I had overheard my wife commenting to a friend how she had stopped into one of the newly redesigned JCP stores and really liked it. That was the first time that I had heard her praise JCPenney in at least 10 years. Her friend had responded that she too had visited the store and really liked it. Having spent most of the last decade in retail I am always a little leery of the “sample-of-one” but two suggests a possible trend.
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